The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a sprawling international agreement currently being negotiated in secret meetings between government and industry representatives around the world — claims to be focused on the kind of trade regulations that affect countries and huge corporations. But in fact, many of its provisions would have profound chilling effects on hackers, makers, and tinkerers.

The problems for hackers and makers stem from the so-called "anti-circumvention" rules that have appeared in leaked drafts of the agreement. That language reflects a controversial clause of U.S. copyright law that makes it illegal to bypass technical measures that are put in place to restrict copyrighted content — such as measures that limit the number of devices on which you can play a video you legally purchased.

This month, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Bruce Lehman, sometimes referred to as the architect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), spoke at a Silicon Valley conference that brought copyright experts together to discuss the impact of that law 15 years later.

At the conference, Lehman admitted the law was the product of a deliberate end-run around the democratic process. Lehman was an advocate for several hardline proposals to criminalize digitial rights management (DRM) circumvention. Unable to sell the proposals domestically, Lehman pressed the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to propose them at the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) instead. Many have accused Lehman of using the treaty process to avoid Congress. What was Lehman’s response to those accusations at the event? “I would say that they're right.”

There's a new front in the battle against digital rights management (DRM) technologies. These technologies, which supposedly exist to enforce copyright, have never done anything to get creative people paid. Instead, by design or by accident, their real effect is to interfere with innovation, fair use, competition, interoperability, and our right to own things.

That's why we were appalled to learn that there is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped.